DIRECTOR’S NOTE BY Yuval Sharon

DIRECTOR’S NOTE BY Yuval Sharon

The Gary L. Wasserman Artistic Director

“Welcome to the Desert of the Real”

From the Valkyries’ flight through the air to the magic fire that encircles Brünnhilde, no single act of Wagner’s operas captures his ambition to push beyond all limits of the possible better than Act III of Die Walküre. And yet this miraculous act also exposes the tragic flaws in Wotan, the chief god, who has built up a hollow and loveless empire teetering on collapse. In this act, we see him cast out Brünnhilde—his fiercest yet most lovable child— for disobeying his law but obeying his true wishes. There is therefore both wonder and bitterness, both marvel and melancholy in this richest and most beloved single acts in all of opera.

Wagner was also a zestful early adapter of technology when it helped him realize his larger-than-life imagination. And technology is at the heart of this production of The Valkyries, which provokes you to consider the current state of opera in the digital age. As the piece itself lives in the tension between magic and disillusionment, I hope you will see reflected in this production both curiosity and caution as to where the art form of opera might be headed.

Until the pandemic, the digitalization of our lives had been slow to impact opera. But, as we all too well remember, the restriction on public gatherings accelerated a rush for opera houses around the world to offer a menu of digital content. All at once, we saw opera performances available on demand; short films and recitals made for digital distribution; and even

the creation of new channels of content modeled on Netflix or HBO Max. We are now traversing unchartered territory as we find our way back to live performances—but our view of opera has irrevocably changed due to the digital disruption. The “normal” some wish we could return to will never come back, and we are in the process of defining a new normal in all aspects of our lives.

The visual language of the production, influenced by the original Tron film and the “Vaporwave” aesthetic of the 80s and 90s, is both futuristic and nostalgic—not unlike Wagner’s Ring cycle, which drew from ancient Norse mythology but featured (in his words) “the music of the future.” The latest and greatest technology within our reach helped create a 3D environment stretching beyond the limitations of a conventional theater. Using a green screen and five live cameras, the singers are placed into this environment in an intricately choreographed realization. We can shift scale, create arresting perspectives, and articulate the moment-by-moment drama in unprecedented ways.

The possibilities promised by this technology can be awe-inspiring–but there remains a tension with the live performance, which is the soul of the work itself. It’s easy to imagine delivering this production only as a “composite image” (what we call the digital background and the live singers) for you to watch at home. But the purpose of this production is to put the digital world side-by-side and on equal footing with the live performance. This might inspire you to delight—I love watching the singers use their imagination and fill an essentially empty space with their performance. But the split might also lead to some uncomfortable questions: Where should I look? Which should I prioritize, the real singer or the screen? How can the animation ever compete with the flesh-and-blood performances before me—and how much is getting flattened out in the transition? What does all this imply about the future of live performance?

There are no easy answers and no right way to react: the real “composite” of the digital and the live will ultimately reside in your experience of this production as it unfolds.

A word that is often used with digitalization is compression: files are compressed to assist rapid sharing. With music, this means that so much of what makes a performance or even a recording unique and memorable is squeezed out so to reduce the sound file to ensure instant, steady playback. To call our version of Wagner’s epic compressed is not just a pun: we are concentrating only on the celebrated Act III of a work that is itself only one part of a four-opera cycle. This concentration allows us to focus on one isolated story—the tragic relationship of father and daughter—within the larger tapestry, and to consider it on its own terms. I also see it as a logical follow-up to my production of La bohème, where we presented the acts in reverse order. The more we can view classic operas as raw material for an exploration of our contemporary lives—with cutting, re-arranging, re-imagining and hacking—the more these works can reveal their inexhaustible wisdom.